The Study of Racialism

This proposed Encyclopedia seems designed to promote the idea that slavery in the Americas was synonymous with African descent. What abou the enslavement of Indians and whites?

So have you emailed him and sent him records and articles?

IMO, the average Joe/Jane has NO idea that slavery was multiracial. if they're lucky, they might know a tidbit about indentured servitude.
Seems to me like the 'bottom line' of this site is to spread such awareness. However, we won't succeed if we keep up this biased exclusivity.
Truth & Knowledge is useless & meaningless if we keep it partial and to ourselves - i.e., "preaching to the choir", if you will...
Hopefully, more of us will publish & dialogue beyond our mixed-race comfort zone.

If anything, they should be soliciting US more directly.

While the Holocaust was an attempt to systematically eradicate various ethnic groups and other undesireables it is most commonly associated with the Jews as they were the group that was primarily targeted. And while factually correct I would hazard a guess that few people (percentage wise) think of Russians, Gypsies or gays (among others) when talking about the Holocaust. This is akin to slavery in the Americas. Yes others were enslaved but their numbers paled in comparison to the sheer numbers of Africans toiling under involuntary servitude, a system which persisted from generation to generation.

I don't understand why would you have a problem with associating slavery with Africans and/or people of African descent? What would be the purpose of such an exercise?

I believe in a complete dialogue regarding this issue which would include ALL available details of the european/west-african holocaust for partial-truths are of NO use to future generations! Yes, I acknowledge/study the fact that the majority of holcaust victims are Jewish & Subsaharan;
but that doesn't make the Gypsy/Irish, etc. slave experience any less arduous.

Comparing tragedies is an exercise in futility. I would never compare the Stalin era purges in Russia to the Rwanda genocidal killings or to the near extermination of the Native Americans in North America. In my opinion these were all events that time and time again exposed the evil that haunts the soul of all humanity. But comparing the number atrocities committed during a historical event is only natural.

One might point out that that there were undoubtedly many Thai and Vietnamese people killed during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror during the 1970s. While each and every one of those deaths was indeed tragic, their stories are but a footnote compared to the stories of the millions of Cambodians that were starved, tortured and/or subsequently executed during that time period.

It is of my opinion that the same holds true for the institution of slavery throughout the Americas. Now I do not know what half-truths you are referring to: indentured servitude and the enslavement of Europeans was taught when I was in school and I would assume it is still being taught to this day. But attempting to give equal weight to circumstances which are anything but equal seems to me to be the work of a rabble rouser as opposed to that of an intellectual.

I was with you up to this point, mate.
Seems that any scholar that transcends the intellectual status quo is perceived as a "rabble rouser" or such.
We tend to push the envelope BEYOND [and are usually persecuted or killed in the process]...

Thanks for the Khmer Rouge/Cambodia info.
I'll be sure to expand my knowledge in this area.
What's your view on the Russian Holocaust of WWII?
Are you willing to collaborate on a pan-holocaust themed paper/encyclopedia entry?

The following statement by Anonymouse is totally inappropriate for this venue:

No one should be required to defend why they are interested in any subject. That Africans were shipped across the Atlantic as slaves is indisputable. That Europeans and especially Native Americans were also forced into lifelong hereditary involuntary labor is also indisputable. That, after the first few generations in the New World, almost everyone was a mix of the three populations should be obvious. With that in mind, to say that the enslaved descendants of Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans were solely "African" (ignoring their other ancestries) merely because they were slaves or, worse, because of a retroactive anachronistic application of the ODR is puerile and unworthy of this site.

If you want to continue this discussion, stick to issue at hand: Is it pedagogically sound to pretend that (1) only Africans were enslaved (ignoring the encomienda is especially ludicrous) and (2) that the descendants of African slaves were somehow of purely African ancestry?

The next time that Anonyouse challenges any other member's right to be interested in any topic whatsoever, Anonymouse will be suspended for two weeks without further warning.

thank you for your input, Mr. Sweet. It is my sincere hope that dispute here shall translate into credible publication.

Any other takers out there

I would be interested as long as you understand that while I am a fairly intelligent guy I am in no way shape or form an intellectual.

There are two issues: Who was sold into slavery? and What do you call their descendants?

On the first issue, Anonymouse is factually correct. Relatively few Europeans were sold into slavery (involuntary, lifelong, hereditary servitude). The main exception were the Irish whom Cromwell sold to plantations in St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat. But for any text on slavery to leave out the enslavement of Native Americans is inexcusable.

On the second issue, the evidence shows that the condition of being a slave and the label associated with genetic traits of African origin became conflated in the United States during the first half of the 19th century. As anyone familiar with the topic knows, continent-of-ancestry was legally irrelevant to the condition of slavery. You were legally a slave if your mother was legally a slave, no matter what you looked like nor what "race" you were. Many slaves, of course, were of mixed ancestry, as are virtually all African Americans today. And early in the century, slaveowners had no qualms about refering to their "white" slaves, especially in ads offering rewards for the capture of runaways. Similarly, in the North, abolitionists often referred to the thousands of "white" people who were in slavery.

But around 1830-35, the terminology shifted. In 1825, a slaveowner would answer a Northern visitor's question, "Yes, she certainly is white, but she is a slave nonetheless." But by 1845, the same question would be answered, "Yes, she certainly looks white, but she is black nonetheless." In other words, the terms "black" and "white" began to move away from being purely descriptive (as they remain in Latin America today) and began to be associated with slavery itself.

This shift in meaning laid the foundation for what became the nationwide ODR a half-century later, and it had several causes. One cause was legal precedent. By 1835, at least two state supreme courts had set a law that no white person could be a slave, and other courts subsequently followed suit. The effect was not to free people with Euro ancestry, of course, but to help shift the termnology. If you were legally a slave, then you were not legally White, even if your ancestry was completely European. See The Invention of the One-Drop Rule in the 1830s North for details.

"White" as a social status rather than race is an interesting bit of pretzel logic. Indeed the "White" category itself constricts and expands as politics change (as well as immigration). Did it necessarily have much to do with "race" or ethnicity even in those days or is this just the result of justifying the chattel status of slave-mother offspring and furthering the economic engine of the time?

Well, if you ask three historians you will get four answers. For one thing it varied over time and region.

Nevetheless, talking about the semantic shift that happened from about 1835 on (if you were legally a slave, then by definition you could not be White), then I personally have no doubt that it was economically driven. The whole idea of capitalizing labor (as an asset rather than an expense) meant that southern agribusiness had most of its wealth tied up in slaves (in contrast to today's land and machinery). Their wealth was in slaves. So anyithing threatening that wealth had to be defeated or ignored. When some courts began to rule that "Whites" could not be slaves, the obvious solution was simply to shift the semantic meaning of "White."

It is a tough tangle to unravel, however, because the semantic shift was happening at the very time when the whole nation was becoming obsessed with slavery. On the one hand, southern slaveowners insisted that Euro slaves were not "White," while abolitionists insisted that they were (some even to the extent of implying that slavery might be tolerable if it were limited to Africans -- see Tenzer). The cataclysm of war ended the debate. It then remained dormant until it was revived as a way of keeping compassionate Whites in line during the Jim Crow terror, in which form it survives today as the ODR.

In the end though, yes, I think that it originated in economics.

truetruetrue.